


The Rookery

by GoldenThreads



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arranged Marriage, Courting Rituals, F/F, F/M, Families of Choice, Illustrations, Marriage of Convenience, Multi, Pining, Polyamory Negotiations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:26:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26177173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenThreads/pseuds/GoldenThreads
Summary: Ever since an arranged marriage dropped Bernadetta in the middle of Edelgard and Hubert's teenage rebellion, it's been Three Against The World. The Emperor and her ravens; the shadow and his Ladies; Bernadetta and...um, well, about that. See, she's maybe fallen in love, just a little bit? ...Again? It's fine. It'll be fine.The Emperor and Her Consort's third and final war: the wooing of Hubert von Vestra.
Relationships: Bernadetta von Varley/Hubert von Vestra, Edelgard von Hresvelg/Bernadetta von Varley, Edelgard von Hresvelg/Bernadetta von Varley/Hubert von Vestra, Edelgard von Hresvelg/Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 51
Kudos: 119
Collections: 2020 Ultra Rarepair Big Bang





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was a blast to write, which is of course code for 'I did too much fiddly worldbuilding and want to stay in this universe a while longer', whoops! I can only hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed the writing. Massive thanks to the URPBB organizers for hosting this!!
> 
> Illustrated by the ever-delightful [@lycheeloving!](https://twitter.com/lycheeloving) Her work shows up in chapters three and four.
> 
> Content warnings: Canon-typical violence & child harm. Also, there's a lizard.

**Imperial Year 1175**

Hubert said nothing as the Marquis beckoned him into the room. Obstinacy would not serve him today. No matter the fury choking his veins, the layers of poison he slathered upon his bones each night in preparation for their dread revenge—someday they would regret, someday they would all _burn_ —what mattered today was efficiency. Lady Edelgard would wake from her afternoon rest in two hour’s time, three at most if last week’s lethargy resurged, and Hubert needed to be on hand to oversee her evening lessons. 

The Marquis sat taking tea with a fellow devil, crystalline whiskey glasses clutched in pristine white gloves, as though Hubert did not know of the dried blood painting their claws beneath. A single breath of that fetid, cigar-clouded air told Hubert this was politics rather than pleasure.

“Hubert.”

He inclined his head slightly, enough to let his bangs obscure the hatred slipping through his tight smile. “Father.”

“We have visitors from—”

“Varley, I presume.” The heraldry embroidered on the man’s lapels told Hubert everything he needed to know.

The Minister of Religion rarely set foot outside his own territory for reasons Hubert had not yet been able to discern. He had not troubled himself with the practicalities of the Insurrection, only lent his troops and his approval from afar. On paper, his isolation and Church dealings should have made him a crucial target. In practice, he wielded little more power than a foul attitude and a tedious choke-hold on Varley’s mining facilities. 

If Marquis Vestra had wished to deal with the man, he would have gone to Varley directly. For them both to be sitting here meant only that Varley was desperate enough to come crawling out of his hideaway—but for what?

“Quick, isn’t he,” grunted Varley. 

“He will have to be,” the Marquis answered mildly. “He is my heir.”

To Hubert’s surprise, Varley pushed his loathsome form out of the chair and stalked over to evaluate Hubert firsthand. They stood of a height, though Hubert’s spindly bones had been adding another inch season after season. Soon he would be able to loom over this sack of shit with more than a nestling’s beak and brows. 

Soon.

Varley walked a full circle of contemplation around him, grave as a butcher surveying new flea-ridden stock, then reached out a hand to brush the unruly hair out of Hubert’s face. On instinct, Hubert smacked that hand away.

 _“Hubert!”_ barked his father, rising to his feet.

But Varley only laughed low and grim. “Pride enough for a beanpole. Very well. The agreement is suitable.”

The agreement.

Ice washed down Hubert’s spine in an instant. Where would his father send him this time? A garrote for the leader of a labor dispute, a summer’s stint in Varley to put the fear of hell into the local spy ring, a delivery of crested blood to the butchers? No. Nothing would drag him from Lady Edelgard’s sickbed. The Marquis may have managed to wrangle a ten-year-old cub, but even he could not endure Hubert’s fangs now.

“Might I ask what agreement is under discussion?” Hubert smiled, eerie and dreadfully polite. 

“One to your benefit.”

Varley flagged down one of the servants lingering against the far wall, grunted an order, and sent the man scurrying off in haste. He settled back down in an armchair across from the Marquis and resumed whatever nauseating drivel had occupied them before Hubert’s arrival. 

Hubert kept an ear open regardless. With this lot, it was as likely to be foxhunts and Enbarr’s latest fashions as wyvern smuggling rings and new research directions in the Church-funded academies. Perhaps they might slip up on whatever this upcoming agreement would be.

The answer, when it came, was far more mundane. A noblewoman came bustling into the room with the tired, overwrought efficiency that Hubert knew so well, and in her train was a tiny slip of a girl.

“Miss Bernadetta von Varley will be your future wife,” announced the Marquis. He could not be bothered with any further explanation for something so routine as the breeding practices of the elite. 

The girl took two stumbling steps forward so that she stood parallel with the elder woman, likely her mother judging by the bone structure, and gave an off-balanced curtsy. If Hubert’s memory served, she was of an age with Edelgard and only two years Hubert’s junior, but from the look of her one would never know it. Even Edelgard, weak as she was, had more color to her cheeks compared to this wide-eyed waif buried beneath so many layers of silk. A decorative little china-boned doll.

Hubert had never given much thought to his eventual spouse. That was Lady Edelgard’s right. The position at his side and in his bed would be rightly decided by her own political needs. For his father to barter him away to better advantage—no.

This brought no advantage upon their family. Crests came and went; Vestras had never relied upon them. This was purely about control. About turning Hubert into his father’s sharp and silent double, a complicit ally in the shadow workings that kept these men in control. Chain him down with a noble wife, give him an outlet to satisfy his grievances, and hypocrisy would bring him to heel. He could not so hate noblemen, noble _husbands,_ if he were one of them.

“Well?” Varley prompted, and only then did Hubert realize they were all waiting for him to make his fumbling introductions to his future bride. “You will find no better. Stupid, sweet-faced, and compliant. More than suitable for a Vestra.”

Hubert scoffed.

“Hardly.”

Their seething glares all turned upon him in an instant, and Hubert could well imagine the vitriol barely contained behind his father’s teeth. Insolence never went unpunished.

But it was a sharp little gasp that caught his ear, more jarring than any fury. Hubert’s eyes flicked back to the girl, and he braced himself to offer a grim nod of meaningless apology. He knew the horrors of the marriage market as well as any spy might. It was only for the best that she have her heart broken now, when innocence would so easily mend it.

Heartbreak did not darken her delicate features. Eyes unfocused beneath a well of tears, head tilted to gaze distantly at the floor, hands clenched in the folds of her lavender skirt—Hubert had witnessed enough frightened women to recognize false terror, and this was no show. Worse, something in the pitch of it was _wrong._ The way blood bloomed on the lip she quickly pulled in between her teeth. The way she gazed toward her father’s feet, not in a plea for protection, but in watchfulness of his every movement.

Bernadetta von Varley had a crest. She lived isolated with a bastard father. She knew the kind of terror that burrowed into one’s bones and rotted them from within.

The pieces clicked neatly together.

“I care little for her capacity as a breeding sow,” Hubert sneered as he turned away from the girl. He folded his hands neatly behind his back, idly thumbing at the dagger he would so much prefer to lodge in Varley’s heart. Cruelty ran in his veins, yet this—well. He hoped the girl would see the kindness in it, someday.

Let her freedom be the first true action Hubert took against the enemy.

Varley purpled marvelously with his fury. “She has a crest, you ungracious whelp.”

Ah, and there was the desperation. Varley needed this. Why? Was the girl damaged, or was he that desperate to have the Vestras in his pocket? They would not have been his first pick in power or prestige. Protection was another story.

Hubert waved a hand. “Unlike you, I cannot stake my house upon such whimsies of inheritance. What I require in a wife is aptitude. Skills with which to enrich our trade. Has she anything to offer?”

A beat of silence. He did not allow it to spill over into further futile sputtering.

“Nothing. Very well, I shall accept the test my lord father has so clearly offered me.”

“You test his _patience,”_ Varley snarled, but the Marquis said nothing. He only watched with reluctant attention as Hubert unfolded his argument like a child unveiling the frog wrapped in his handkerchief.

“I am the future of House Vestra, sir. Patience is my prerogative. Should I become your son-in-law, you will become well aware of that fact.” Hubert gave the girl another cursory glance. “All you have brought me is a girl still young enough to have the proper Vestra skillset trained into her.”

She flinched.

“So let us train her. If you wish her wed into this house, then turn her over to us and make good on your offer.”

Even Varley balked at that. “She is barely thirteen—”

“And she will not be wed a day before sixteen.” And not touched. Ever. “Until that day, she will learn the arts and practices of my household. I trust my father will concede the logic of such an _arrangement.”_

Marquis Vestra’s lips slid over his teeth, catching on a chipped canine. It was not a smile. “Unless the girl is as stupid as promised.”

Hubert willed the girl to look up and answer him, to show the slightest spark, but her eyes remained fixed lifelessly upon the floor.

“She—you cannot simply—her marks are—” 

Hubert’s smirk never fit so well upon his face as it did now, watching Varley seize up like a hare in a fox’s den. 

“If she— _when_ she fails your tests, I’m not taking her back. There is no value in used goods,” the man finally spat. “You’ll pay me upfront or no deal.”

“I’m certain my father will be happy to iron out the details with you. Pardon me, my _birth_ father. For you shall be as a father to me as well now, hmm? Fear not. I promise to make use of the girl regardless.”

  


—

  


Later, after their fathers shook on the deal, Hubert led the girl away through the dim hallways of the underbelly of the imperial palace. She had no chaperone, nor would she ever have one again. By needle or claw, Vestra women always did without. Her steps were quick and silent. She nodded whenever he gave a command. 

Hubert waited until they were far enough away from their minders, then directed her into a rarely-used common room in the servant quarters. A Silence spell whirled to life with a flick of his fingers.

“Bernadetta,” he began, tasting the name on his tongue. Saccharine—like a burst of sweet apple in a freshly barked tart, or the mild distraction from a sip of rat poison? “Why is your father selling you off?”

She went so still he could not be certain she still breathed.

While Hubert held no patience for the bloodsucking ticks that led their government, he had it in spades for…well, Edelgard. Perhaps he could extend that luxury to one more living soul, if only for a few minutes. He took a breath and explained as calmly as he could, “Tell me now so that I can deal with it.”

Finally, the girl opened her mouth.

He immediately wished she hadn’t. Every word stole three breaths from her body, a slow-motion suffocation as she forced herself through a stutter so violent it felt like the snapping of bones.

“To. To be. B-Bernie can be. A good w-wife. Bernie can.” Tears streamed down her soft cheeks, marring the hint of blush that someone had painted there. She still would not look at him. Hadn’t even once.

“…I have no need of one. And I have no intention of being any sort of husband to you.” 

As gently as he could, without only the smoothest of movements, Hubert dropped into a crouch from which he could almost catch her line of sight. She raised her hands at once to wipe at her face, masking her expression if not her weak sobs, and Hubert’s eyes followed the thin lines of silver scar tissue that peeked out as her gloves shifted away from her long sleeves.

He rasped her name, horror-struck. “Has someone…”

Bernadetta’s eyes peeked between her fingers, met his, and—

She dropped.

_“Shit!”_

Hubert sprang forward on his knees, barely catching her before she smashed her head against the floor. She was light, so inconsequential in his arms. Even when Edelgard needed his assistance to move room from room, it was never…this. Still and silent and _wrong_ in his arms. 

No. Hubert would not suffer any noble cage to trap this particular songbird. 

He laid her down upon a couch and draped his jacket over her frail form. In a moment, he would retreat to the hall and summon one of the maids to wait with her. He would instruct the lady to convey Bernadetta to Lady Edelgard’s quarters, where Hubert would swiftly introduce them. His Lady had need of a companion and Bernadetta of protection.

Perhaps this would be a suitable arrangement after all.

  


* * *

  


**Imperial Year 1187**

Bernadetta was.

Absolutely.

Positively.

_Categorically._

The worst wife in the world. 

She knew this. She had lived with this fact for well over a decade. 

She thought she had made her peace with it, all until dinner together a week earlier when Hubert— _her husband_ —pulled out a chair for her next to Lady Edelgard. Bernadetta sat between the two of them, as she always did, but suddenly her heart kicked off so wildly in her chest that she ended up fading faster than the souffle. She scuttled away after dessert and had known no solace ever since. 

It rattled around in her chest, carving her hollow and leaving only the dessicated lump of her heart to rattle—not that there were two rattles, exactly, just. Everything bad. Love squeezing her apart with the slow burn of lye sinking into her skin, decomposing in despair. How could Hubert _do_ this to her?! Wasn’t it enough that she’d already given her heart away, that she protected the only heart Hubert cared about in the entire world?

But she hadn’t protected it. Because her heart fluttered at Hubert’s soft smiles, and that meant the end of everything.

“Are you with me?” hummed the voice by her ear, fond and firm in equal measure.

Bernadetta turned her loathsome face away into the couch cushions. _Yes,_ she thought with such force it should rightly burst from her back into wings, _I am here. I am yours. I’m sorry. I love you. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry—_

Her lover’s fingers trailed down her spine bump by bump. One-two, one-two, hopping along a stepping stone path to the farthest ridge of Bernadetta’s tailbone. Were they standing, that wandering hand would settle at the small of her back, a point of grounding pressure that had gotten Bernadetta through everything from choral performances at the monastery to her initial presentation in front of Enbarr’s elites as the Emperor’s Lady-in-Waiting. Instead, it journeyed upward once more, one-two, one-two, continuing along its way until Bernadetta’s lungs finally reached out for that beat and began to settle.

The panic unfolded like a decorative napkin, cotton softly shifting, and unveiled the world around her once more. The well-worn couch in Edelgard’s study. The scent of chamomile and tallow thick in the old carpet. The Emperor’s hands upon her, warm.

A kiss pressed against her hair. “Shall I sit with you?”

“Please,” Bernadetta croaked. _Please stay._

The world shifted once more, and Bernadetta squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Only once there were bare, callused fingers carding through her hair, and the scarlet pillow of her favorite lap beneath her head, and a gentle hum of music for her alone—only then did she start to cry.

“Love you, El.” 

“And I you,” Edelgard promised. “So nothing can be so wrong with the world.”

“But it _is_. It’s terrible, Bernie is—”

“Terribly wonderful. Or do you doubt my judgment?”

“No!”

“Then say it for me. Please?”

Bernadetta gritted her teeth, hating and loving whenever Edelgard did this. It made her feel like a little girl practicing her words in front of the mirror again; it made her feel like the little girl that a _princess_ fell in love with. “Bernie is terribly wonderful _ly perfectly awful._ You d-don’t understand, I…I think…”

All the while, Edelgard’s hands never stopped tenderly smoothing down her hair. 

It was unbearable. A hot brand of anger singed Bernadetta’s throat, and she pushed away from all those loving comforts, scrambling to the far side of the couch.

She couldn’t accept it any longer, couldn’t let Edelgard be so sweet to someone who didn’t deserve it. Everyone always said Bernadetta couldn’t be trusted, was too _flighty_ , too unsure, and now it was true. Now even her heart didn’t know what it wanted, and that was the only thing Bernadetta had always been able to rely on. 

Her eyes darted around the room to make sure they really were alone in Edelgard’s study. Bernadetta always curled up in there during the day. Well, not always, but if she wasn’t feeling energetic enough to go outside or exhausted enough to stay in the imperial bedroom all day—so seventy, eighty percent of the time?—then she would sit in Edelgard’s study and listen to the Emperor do her paperwork, and they’d take tea together, and sometimes Edelgard would lie down with her for a nap, and sometimes they’d kiss, and.

And if she said anything now, maybe they’d never kiss again. But Bernadetta _had_ to.

“I think I’m in love with Hubert,” she blurted.

Edelgard nodded. 

Waited.

And finally tilted her head when Bernadetta did not continue. “Is…that all?”

“Yes!”

Her brow furrowed. “But you already loved Hubert.”

“Not like this!”

“How is it different?”

“How is it—” Bernadetta screeched between her teeth and reached for a pillow, needing something to hold onto. 

This should have been simple! Sins confessed, the Emperor would storm out in a fury, and Bernadetta’s happy life would go up in smoke. She wasn’t supposed to have to _explain._

“Bernie thinks—”

 _“I_ think,” Edelgard corrected mildly, and Bernadetta hurled the damn pillow in her face.

The Emperor _giggled._ She was still smiling about all this, when Bernadetta had broken everything, crumpled up their whole lives together and thrown it into the fireplace like a bad first draft.

“I love you,” she shouted with tears burning in her eyes. “And I love Hubert. I _love_ love him, I think! Maybe!”

Incredulously, all Edelgard said was, “I thought you always had.”

“No! He was just my friend!”

“Alright.”

“It’s not alright!”

“Well. I love Hubert, too. Is that not alright?” Edelgard’s open tone shuttered, just a bit, enough to veer into _snippy_ or _wounded_ or _going to slip pepper flakes into Bernadetta’s tea as a prank and get dreadfully offended if anyone calls it childish._

“You don’t love him like I do.”

_“Excuse me?”_

“I mean! I—oh, El, just… Featherstitch!”

With a huff of frustration, Edelgard turned around and scowled at the far wall. Bernadetta did the same, turning until they were facing opposite directions. Sometimes it was just too hard to fight with the Emperor, or to be looked at by anyone, really, so that was why they had a special codeword. Now they both had to look away and count for a hundred and twenty seconds of silence. 

Edelgard didn’t turn back around even when the two minutes were done. Her voice grated like wagon wheels over ice, smooth between each arduous stretch of gravel. “I thought you knew my heart better than anyone.”

“I’m sorry. Bernie’s not explaining right. She—I thought—” Deep breaths. “I always loved you and Hubert differently.”

The tense line of Edelgard’s shoulders slowly fell to a slump, and she folded her legs up under her skirt until she looked like the scarlet blossom of a trumpet vine, beautiful and happy to dismember anything impeding her growth. “I only love one way.”

Oh. 

Was love supposed to be different, or always the same? Bernadetta wasn’t sure, and Dorothea was much too far away to ask. She didn’t trust anyone else’s answer. She’d have to make do.

“But you don’t…with him. It’s different, because we, um…?”

“I am his _Emperor._ He would never wish such a thing.” That was true. Hubert always had so many rules. “And I do not require affections be paid to me. I simply love him. As I do you. Love is one of the only things that I have ever found…free. Have I given it too freely for your liking?”

 _“No!_ No, listen to me, please. I thought you would be mad at _me,_ because I’m _yours._ Always have been. But. But part of me feels…weird, now. When I think about him. Maybe it’ll go away.”

“I have felt _weird_ about you for half my life, Bernadetta. It does not go away.”

An awkward giggle tumbled from Bernadetta’s lips. It sounded so much simpler that way. Love was big and scary, like the words she swore at the marriage altar, the ones she could never live up to because their lives were something different. But Weird? That was a hummingbird buzzing at bellflowers, not snow white doves crossing the sky in poignant augury of fairytale bliss. She liked Weird.

Edelgard continued, “And you don’t need my _permission_ to be in love with your husband.”

Weird was canceled. Awfulness resumed. Bernadetta groaned the most plaintive groan ever heard within the palace walls, then sagged against Edelgard’s shoulders. “Can’t I? Can’t you just, well, tell me no?”

“Why would I wish to?”

 _“Because!!_ Ugh, it’s…no, actually, it’s like you said, El! It’s exactly the same.”

“What, precisely, is the same?”

“I am his _Wife._ He’d never want to be with me. He has his rules, right? You’re in the little Emperor box and I’m in the little Wife box and he keeps us safe and sound in his pocket next to all the poisons and knives. But he won’t ever, _ever_ open the box, because that’s—” Bernadetta gestured vaguely with a flop of her hand. “Menacing pressure. Noble obligation. Something something. He couldn’t open the boxes even if he wanted to. His honor won’t allow it. But I want to know if he wants to! I _need_ to know. Because what if I’ve been a bad wife all along?! I mean, I know I’m a bad wife, that was the _point,_ because he’s safe and I’m safe, and it’s very very nice to be married to a friend and not a monster, I really cannot emphasize how very very nice that is!!”

At some point Edelgard had turned back around, and she clasped Bernadetta’s hands to keep Bernadetta from picking at them amid her whirlwind rambles.

“So you see? It’s the perfect marriage because it’s not a marriage, but now I’m breaking all the rules because I’m in _love_ with him—maybe—and now he’ll hate me for ruining our marriage.”

“Loving your husband would ruin your marriage?”

“Yes. Exactly. It’s _horrid.”_

The Emperor burst out laughing with such force that only her tremendous grasp kept Bernadetta from bolting away. “What a pair we make, my raven… I am glad you told me all this, instead of Hubert.” She pulled Bernadetta’s hand to her lips, kissing each knuckle in turn. “He will nail shut the lids of those boxes if he finds out about our affections. It is not in his nature to accept such things. We will need to be very clever, tactical even, if we wish to win him to our cause.”

She was up in an instant, marching across her office with dreadful intent as she swept up a pen and parchment. Edelgard spread the paper over the tea table, marked out a few familiar columns, and sat back to think.

They were the same columns she had used ten years ago when the three of them sat in a closet planning a complete overthrow of the political apparatus. Strengths. Weaknesses. Opportunities. Threats. In five minutes flat, she had prepared a chilling array of bullet points detailing Hubert’s infuriating psyche. Bernadetta hoped she’d never been the subject of such a list.

“We have to speak his language for this sort of thing.” Edelgard pursed her lips. “If we use our own, he’ll think we’re being silly.”

“I don’t know if, um, I can come up with threats very well, so…”

“Not that language. His love language. What he calls duty and service and all that. It’s really only—”

A particular eight-beat code tapped suddenly against the study door, and before either of them could move an inch, Hubert swept inside. “Your Majesty, the delegates from—”

He paused to survey the room.

Edelgard met his gaze with ferocious magnetism, endeavoring to pin him down through will alone as her hand moved to cover his name on her war plans. Bernadetta both froze and turned to gelatin all at once, slowly sliding away down the couch like a snail’s slow journey through a field of salt, a quietly brutal death. She did not look up. She stared at the pages and tried to self-destruct. 

“I see you are busy.”

“Yes,” Edelgard answered with eerie intensity. “With the groundwork for our next war. It does not concern you. Begone.”

Hubert stared at her. “Our enemies have been dealt with. What possible war—”

“Domestic.”

 _“El,”_ squeaked Bernadetta, one hand latching onto the Emperor’s skirt. She hadn’t managed to immolate herself yet. Maybe the kindling needed two.

“Certainly there is a measure of internal tension, but it is well within acceptable bounds. I have heard nothing to the contrary from any of my sources.”

“Excellent. Go follow up and confirm those findings.”

“It has been done.”

“Not to my satisfaction!” Edelgard nearly shrieked. The pen slowly dripped ink onto her paperwork.

After a momentary frown, Hubert’s gaze slid to Bernadetta and softened slightly. “Lady Vestra.”

“H-Hubert.”

He nodded stiffly. “Very well. I will handle the delegation. Excuse me.”

Edelgard waved an imperious hand in dismissal, and Hubert bowed as he made his exit.

They waited for the length of three whole featherstitches before falling together in giggles and agony. Even within the circle of the Emperor’s arms, Bernadetta couldn’t shake the dread specter of her mortification. Hubert would think they were closing him out of their secrets, or plotting against him, or, or—

“It won’t be easy,” Edelgard whispered. She tipped their foreheads together as she stroked the long tails of Bernadetta’s hair. “Are you sure you want to try?”

She didn’t have to think about the answer.

“Yes. It’s Hubert. He’s worth…well, _everything.”_

And even though Bernadetta could only see Edelgard’s wobbly smile through her newly-welling tears, she swore it never looked so beautiful and bright.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> But if YOU'RE in love with Hubert, and I'M in love with Hubert, then why's he still skulking outside?


	2. Chapter 2

**Imperial Year 1175**

The world spun a little as Edelgard opened her eyes. Silly her, trying to do something as complex as seeing and moving her head all at once. She let her eyelids flutter closed once more, bracing herself until the swell of nausea passed. There was a sweetness in the room today—a window cracked open, with honeysuckle and sparrow song on the breeze. It could mean only one thing.

Sure enough, the next time she peeled open her eyes, a soft blur of lilac lurked in a chair by the window. It slowly crystallized into the shape of a girl, legs tucked up under her, head and shoulders hunched over the embroidery hoop so passionately adorned under the sun’s charitable offering of good light. 

“You’re here,” Edelgard rasped quietly. It was still enough to shatter the easy silence of the bedroom, and Bernadetta jolted near off the chair in her surprise. Before any apologies or protestations or imperial prostrations could start spilling out of her companion, Edelgard forced a smile and added, “I’m glad.”

She started to push herself into a sitting position, and in an instant Bernadetta was there to brace her shoulders and gracelessly pull her back against the pillowed headboard. A glass of water found its way into Edelgard’s hands a moment later.

After a few weeks, the mortification of such assistance had lost its edge. Edelgard’s strength still failed her more often than not, though even that struggle was preferable to the times the physical stress of her illness set off her crest and nearly cleaved the sickbed, the floorboards, and trays of biscuits in two with sudden force. 

Bernadetta never asked about the crests. She never asked about anything. She only observed, keenly watching for cracks in the world that she could disappear into. She had a crest too, Edelgard knew. She would have been on the list. So it was lucky Edelgard had lived. 

That wasn’t what you were supposed to think when you saw your friend each day. But it was enough. 

“Can I see your work?” 

Bernadetta nibbled on her lip, which meant she either didn’t want to share, or that Edelgard had already asked the same question in a haze sometime earlier. 

The thick fog that slowly filtered through her mind swept many such memories away, old and new, weighing her down into this bed with its cool sheets, into a stifling cell with cool manacles around her wrists, two points of history fading into one and slipping away. Edelgard could not fight it any more than she could strip the crests from her flesh, the reality of the butchers’ hands upon her. She did not try. She grit her teeth and drifted along the waves, waiting for healing’s shore where she could finally build in earnest. She slept easily when exhaustion took her, dreaming of that shore and all the dried grasses thereon, lumber enough for her family’s biers, stone enough for memorials, and everything ready to _burn._

“Y-yes, Lady Ed—” The other girl took a big gulp of air and pronounced carefully, “E-del-gard.” She passed over the embroidery hoop for inspection, her hands clawing unhappily at her skirt as Edelgard lifted it to the light and turned it over to marvel at how effortlessly every thread had been tidied. 

“Fine indeed,” Edelgard remarked. She had quickly learned that effusive praise, or any big words like _exquisite_ or _breathtaking_ would send Bernadetta curling back into her shell. That was a battle shelved for later. For now, Edelgard focused on simple appreciation and an honest voice. Let Bernadetta learn to recognize the tone of good faith compared to the simpering tricks of the bad, and the rest would come in time.

The project was smaller than Bernadetta’s usual endeavors. Edelgard had never held any interest in needlecraft, and it had never occurred to her how tricky it must be to trap the edges of a handkerchief firmly within an embroidery hoop. A leafy vine in a dark pine-green curled all the way around the border of the white silk, and now little pinpricks of new color had sprouted—foxglove, nightshade, monkshood. In some places the vague outline of an embellished cursive H had begun to take shape.

Tracing her thumb over the delicate stitches, Edelgard hummed, “For your intended, I see.”

Bernadetta nodded. “To, um…to show him I’m. Learning.” She snatched back the hoop the moment Edelgard’s grip faltered, if only to have somewhere to focus her gaze as she avoided Edelgard’s too-keen eyes. “I h-have to do. Something.”

Three weeks ago, Hubert sent her a bouquet of roses. Two weeks ago it was wildflowers. One week, and Bernadetta burst into Edelgard’s room in tears with an overgrown aloe vera that needed a new pot. They’d named it Thornbert von Prickle, and it currently lived on Edelgard’s windowsill where it could gobble up as much light as it wanted, unlike its namesake.

To Edelgard’s eye, there was a clear method to Hubert’s otherwise bizarre gifts. He began with the most general expression of his message, then gradually refined it to better suit Bernadetta’s idiosyncrasies—no small task, seeing as Bernadetta had yet to say more than fifty words total to him. Every time he tried to make conversation, she scurried away to fetch Edelgard instead, as though she were the only one who could ever hold his interest, or worse, muzzle his temper. 

The roses offered the trappings of storybook romance: unnecessary, to his relief. The wildflowers reflected Bernadetta’s disregard for elite sensibilities: she loved what she loved, and some things fit society’s expectations, and others didn’t. The aloe prodded at her caring nature, inquired if the healing arts could satisfy her—no, she enjoyed the grasping thorns more than the gooey wealth within. Each gift taught Edelgard more about her new friend as well, and she passed her findings on to Hubert each evening when they discussed his…work.

“Did Hubert bring you something new?”

A tremor overtook Bernadetta as she tried to answer. All she could manage was, “He—” before the tears began to fall.

Edelgard waited. Patience was the only skill she could hone at the moment, and if she mastered it now, someday she would never need to endure it again.

“A greenhouse,” Bernadetta sputtered. “A whole—”

_Void’s sake, Hubert. Don’t leave her pearls before she can handle a penny._

Redoubling on her interested smile, Edelgard said, “How lovely. Is it nearby? I would enjoy a walk this afternoon, legs willing.”

Bernadetta shook her head.

“Alright…” She reached out and took Bernadetta’s limp hand, tapping along the stepping stones of her knuckles in a predictable pattern. One-two, one-two, just as her sister Sieglinde had always done for the little ones. “Tell me everything about it when the words come. No sooner.”

“You don’t understand!” Bernadetta wailed.

“Then teach me.”

It was that simple. It would always be. Edelgard had only to instill confidence enough in the girl to see it.

“But…Hubert’s your friend, so…”

“Yes. Just as you are my friend. And if he has behaved atrociously, he shall hear his Lady’s condemnation of such actions.”

“But I’m not. Worth that much. To b-be…bought, or bribed, or. I can’t. Give…things-in-return, like a m-man might. Want.” Bernadetta’s eyes pinched so tightly closed that it must have hurt, but she kept going, and Edelgard’s heart lurched with pride even as she struggled to make sense of the words. “And if they’re _tests,_ then I—I have to _pass,_ I don’t want to go _back._ Oh Lady Edelgard, please, I know B-Bernie’s not much, any, use to you, but don’t. Send me away. _Please.”_

Edelgard grabbed the edge of the blanket and held it high. “Come here.”

Just this once, Bernadetta didn’t need to be asked twice. She dove for the warm, dark hiding hole, and Edelgard yanked the blanket over both of their heads once she had settled, sealing them into a cave of their own making. Bernadetta curled into a ball, and she fit just right into Edelgard’s arms, which had never gotten to hold anyone for keeps and squeezed all the tighter for it.

“Listen to me, Bernadetta. I will never send you away. _Ever._ I swear to you on—” Ten forgotten graves. No. “Thornbert von Prickle’s honor.”

That got the smallest hiccup of laughter among all the tears. Good.

“There are no tests. There are no chains. You need do nothing to stay with me, and if you ever want to fly free of the palace, you have my blessing. A place will still be here for you.” And frankly, if Bernadetta’s father ever spoke another word to her, Edelgard would have let him meet an abruptly happy accident. 

“The fact of the matter is that Hubert is…odd.” Edelgard frowned as she considered how to explain. “You know how feral cats are different from house cats? When I was _very_ little, Hubert was a prickly house cat. Now he’s feral inside. He doesn’t know how to put the teeth and claws away, even around his people.”

She wished he did. It would be so nice to be held by him, just for a little, and dream the rest of this nightmare away.

“This is his way of leaving a dead mouse on your doorstep. It’s how he shows…whatever it is he’s not letting himself feel. Hubert doesn’t like his relationships to have feelings. He just wants them to have rules, so he knows how to act. It’s service. He certainly doesn’t want anything from you. A wife’s like a princess to someone like him. He’ll keep bringing you gifts until he figures out what you like, and then he’ll bring you that one forever.” 

Timid, that was the word for how Hubert danced around Bernadetta. It didn’t suit him, but the fear she carried weighed on him more than he would ever admit.

“I guess you can only have so many greenhouses, though… I can tell him to stop. He’d listen if you told him, too, but I know he can be scary.”

Bernadetta squirmed under the blankets, which meant she was taking the words to heart. That was the very first thing Edelgard had learned about her: if she was silent and still, her mind had galloped off somewhere far away. If she fidgeted, she was just fine. 

“Bernie does, um, like plants. Like!! Cute ones. Like Mr. Thornbert not…roses and things. Like proper girls.” She picked nervously at the sewing calluses on her hands. “There, er. There aren’t proper flowers in the greenhouse. It’s all. Poisons. Is that a…threat? Or nice? I did tell him I’d learn Vestra-y things.”

“Do you _want_ to learn Vestra-y things?”

The blanket moved with Bernadetta’s shrug. 

“If you don’t truly want to learn any of those things—and no one would blame you, _and_ Hubert probably doesn’t even want you to!—then it’s fine to do something else.” Hubert only arranged the excuse of a Vestra education to get her out of her house. He hadn’t yet solved the problem of only trading one cage for another, but at least here nobody yelled at Bernadetta or tied her to chairs. 

Bernadetta’s frown didn’t so much as twitch. It still wasn’t getting through. 

Edelgard sighed and shifted so she was lying down on her side, no longer propping up their tent quite so high. It fell down until the only space was the one between them.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Edelgard asked the fluffy lavender mop huddled aside her. 

This was for Bernadetta’s sake. Frankly, it was not even true. 

It was still so much easier to say it in the dark.

“Hubert blames himself. He couldn’t save me. So I think saving you…helps.” How strange it must have been for him to preserve a life rather than take one. Death was Hubert’s trade; Death was Edelgard’s history. Together they could not end well, but with Bernadetta planted nearby like a stubborn weed, opening curtains and letting in the light—

“Do you still need saving?” Bernadetta asked softly. She raised her head just enough to meet Edelgard’s gaze, dim violets in the gloom.

“No. I’m going to save myself.”

And she would. But if it felt a little bit like Hubert _had_ saved her, by bringing her Bernadetta to fill all these lonely hours of recovery, well…

Edelgard took Bernadetta’s hand and squeezed it tight. “I hope you enjoy the greenhouse. But if you can’t find a use for Hubert’s dead mice, then…we’ll skin them and stitch them into coats. A new style to take the capital by storm.”

Bernadetta giggled at that like the odd and feral little creature she was. 

“Now. To other business. Have you given any thought to where we last left the little lords of Lycia?” Edelgard hooked an ankle around Bernadetta’s, nudging her to stretch out and make herself more comfortable under their tent before the onslaught of world-building began.

Last week, she had tempted Bernadetta into reading aloud for her, and they were both so frustrated by the end of the story that they decided to make a new one. Bernadetta had broken down the narrative, combed through it for flaws as though carding fresh wool, and begun to reconstruct it from the ground up based on more realistic driving instincts for each of the characters. For the most part content to listen, Edelgard still prodded her companion into new directions here and there—how could the League preserve unity among so many contradictory forces, if no voice had supremacy? Why did the citizens prefer one system to another? To consider the peasantry completely bereft of their own desires was—

And Bernadetta would shush her, continuing on with the story of her merchant girl running away with a wyvern rider, but somehow all of the answers to Edelgard’s questions made their way into the narrative anyway. The girl never stopped thinking in all directions.

Someday Bernadetta would look at maps, at battlefields, at diplomatic letters and see what Hubert couldn’t. 

For now, Edelgard closed her eyes and settled into the story, the company, the warmth beside her. Lethargy tugged at her limbs, dragging her back down into oblivion. But she was patient. She did not fear.

Edelgard could not save her siblings. She could not even preserve their memories. Yet their ghosts folded in around her, hands quick with needles, tongues overflowing with stories, blankets tucked over sleepy heads. New memories stitched their way into Edelgard’s skin, sharp and sweet little moments knitting her back together—the rush of kindling bravery into another’s heart, of Bernadetta’s mouth pressed into a thin line of determination, of timid smiles and rambling passions unchecked by fear. Edelgard’s life had been whittled down to fragments of peat and bone. So be it.

Seeds would still sprout in her remains.

  


* * *

  


**Imperial Year 1187**

“Are you telling me to die?” 

Bernadetta did _not_ jump at the quiet hum behind her, nor did she crinkle all the silk flowers under her suddenly clenched fists, and there were no screams bottled up in her throat whatsoever. She simply finished centering the new wreath upon Hubert’s office door, then carefully stepped back down the stool. 

Her cheeks hadn’t betrayed her by turning oleander pink, either! She had this. She was in control. 

She spun to face Hubert’s dour stare and…promptly had to look at her shoes instead, what with how unbearably _soft_ his gaze had grown. The way a husband might look at his wife, if everything wasn’t fake vows and distant pleasantries. It was best not to get comfortable with such a look.

“Aha, w-why would you think that?” she asked her feet. 

Hubert’s shoes were five whole paces away. When he took one step forward for closer investigation, he moved slow enough to give her time to scurry away and preserve the distance. 

Bernadetta wished she were brave enough to stand her ground, but soon enough she’d wiggled away to give him his personal space bubble. But it was a good thing, really, because now she could watch him from behind—professionally! Not in a creepy way, she swore!

The flowers of her arrangement popped with even brighter colors as Hubert handled them with pristine white gloves, his fingers brushing over pressed and embroidered petals with a solemn reverence. “Foxglove, nightshade, monkshood. Larkspur and—” He counted. “At least three species of lily. Yarrow and bloodroot to fill out the arrangement.” He caught up a length of daintily drooping hearts hanging from the wrapped stems. “And bleeding hearts for the ribbon. Every last one of them a violent toxin.”

“I know, that’s why—”

“An assassination attempt on my own doorstep. Dastardly indeed, Lady Vestra.”

_“No,_ they’re—” 

The first plants he ever gave her, when he was little more than a gaunt stalk of a creature himself, unmoored from any nourishing soil. The first plants he taught her from afar, in books and letters, never infringing upon her solitude with his loathsome presence. The first plants she learned to dry and press and process into ingredients for the Vestra labs, making herself truly useful, and the first ones she had embroidered for him on a shaky handkerchief so many years ago. 

But the words tripped on her tongue and guttered out against the gate of her teeth, unable to make it past the final hurdle. She balled up her fists tight enough to hurt and focused on that pain instead of her burgeoning tears.

“I suppose foxglove is common enough for laymen to understand the warning. If it keeps even one incompetent caller from my door, it will have done its job. You have my thanks.”

“You…really like it?” 

Hubert paused, and then his feet slowly inched towards her once more. His hand fell upon her shoulder, his mouth lowering not to her ear but to the crown of her head, as though he were only two breaths from bestowing a kiss thereon. “I cherish everything you have ever given me, Lady Vestra.”

And then he slid into his office, the door shut, and Bernadetta sagged with relieved fury—furious relief?—pitiful terrible longing. He still didn’t get it. Cherishing wasn’t the same as loving. 

It was time for the _big_ plans.

  


—

  


For Hubert’s birthday, a tacitly banned holiday in the imperial household, Edelgard arranged a private dinner for just the three of them. Well, technically it was a team effort. The only way to celebrate a Great Tree Moon birthday in peace was to celebrate one with Ferdinand first, so Bernadetta ran herself ragged driving the Prime Minister to such happy distraction that he never noticed the Emperor and her Ravens were suspiciously all absent one evening.

They did not feast, since such indulgence was unnecessary: no one at the table could stomach more than a single course of even their favorite food, though of course dessert did not count. The rich venison stew paired marvelously with the loaves of Varley rye that Bernadetta baked in the afternoon, and conversation flowed in place of wine. 

Edelgard’s toe stroked soothingly against Bernadetta’s calves under the table, gently enough not to snag on her tights, and now and then their game accidentally bumped into Hubert’s shins.

Only once their dessert dishes had been swept away did Hubert clear his throat in disapproval. “Perhaps the lovebirds might sit on the same side of the table the next time we dine.”

“I thought they already were,” Edelgard answered mildly, and she did not flinch a muscle when Bernadetta kicked her sharply under the table with newfound precision.

Hubert offered no answer to that remark beyond a furrow of his already heavy brows. “Still, a delightful evening. My thanks to you both. Now, if the celebrations have concluded…?”

“Wait!” Bernadetta scrambled from her chair. “H-Hubert. Can, um, _may_ I walk you back to your office?”

“My, my. Am I now so elderly as to require a chaperone?”

She ducked her head and looped an arm around Hubert’s, even as he froze stiffly within her grasp. 

Edelgard huffed in gentle laugher. “Very well. Our resident senior citizen is released of all further birthday duties.”

Unable to bow in proper form with his wife hanging off his arm, Hubert merely nodded his assent. He wheeled them around and on out of the dining room. 

Bernadetta said not a word the entire walk, head bowed, attention fixed on the matched cadence of shiny Vestra boots upon the carpet. She should have said something. Invited him to her room instead, to sit and talk, to—sit next to him, maybe close the distance, maybe hold his hand. She was holding his arm right then, so surely a hand was not such a challenge! In fact, nothing was stopping her from lacing their fingers right this moment, except…

Except that he might not like it. That he might endure it with a fixed smile, because she could break all the rules she wanted, but that didn’t mean he wanted her to. 

Except that he might look to her in horror, that she had betrayed his Emperor with her fickle heart—even though Edelgard was surely following them from a casual distance, fingers crossed behind her back, ready to intervene with endless support and further lack of clarity. 

Except that Hubert was so _precise,_ in all things, and this awkward fumbling was undeserving of him, _Bernadetta_ was undeserving of him, and—

The shoes came to a halt, and Bernadetta glanced up to see a familiar door with a vibrantly toxic wreath. 

“Oh. It’s your stop.” 

“Keen eye.” 

If they were normal people, she could have kissed him then. Could have been kissing him for years, ever since he first offered to escort her to a fabric shop in town, lurking in the light so she could slip into his shadow. It took her so many years to understand his service came without any strings attached, that love could look so selfless instead of so wretched. 

Now she wanted the strings so she could suture them together skin to skin until he understood.

“Are you unwell?” he asked softly, as though the pallor of her cheeks was from sickness and not a timid heart.

“Why wouldn’t I be!! Um, so, present! I got you a birthday present. Here. Just take it, please.” Bernadetta reached into her satchel for the flat, elaborately wrapped box she’d been carrying all evening. “Happy birthday, Hubert. I hope it was a good one.”

The corners of Hubert’s grim smile twitched. “You always make them so, Lady Vestra.”

He stepped away, two seconds from offering her the traditional bow due to the Emperor’s consort, and she crowded right back into his space. 

“No! Open it here. You need to—there’s an order to this. Step one, present!”

Hubert’s eyes, or rather the visible one, flashed wide in surprise. With the same meticulous care as he handled her flytraps and pitchers, he untied the slim white ribbon and unfolded the embossed wrapping paper. He lifted the lid, and with it went the net that had kept all of Bernadetta’s tightly woven anxieties in check, because what if he didn’t like it!

It was just handkerchiefs inside, after all. Nothing fancy like jewels or new throwing knives. But he’d kept every set she’d ever embroidered for him, pristinely folded in among dried flowers from her garden and all the other trinkets she left in his office. She needed him to like these too, or else— 

A bark of sudden laughter rang out, and for once, Bernadetta sagged in relief instead of wilting in fear.

Hubert pulled one out of the box and held it up for a better look, grinning like a vicious madman skipping his way to the gallows. The quartet of fine cotton squares had been based on the morbid Srengi puppet show put on by the Mittelfrank’s most recent international festival. Little dancing skeletons trotted all over the border, and in the center one reclined among a hearty banquet with the words: **Be Cheerful, Enjoy Your Life!**

“So you like them? Right?”

Unsuccessfully reeling in his murderous mirth, Hubert flashed a terrifying smile. “Very much so. I…cannot recall ever saying these words in full honesty before, but I would go as far as to admit I _adore_ them.”

“Good! Good. Um, don’t fold it back up. Actually, here—” Bernadetta reached out and took the box back from him. “Now take off your gloves. I mean, that’s step two. Give me your gloves!”

He did so in mute acquiescence. 

“I know you keep them clean but I don’t know what’s on them… Now wipe off your hands with the handkerchief. Good, step three done.”

“Dare I ask about step four?”

Bernadetta took him by the hand and led him down the hall, past the office with its deadly wreath and on to the little parlor next door. He never used it, and the connecting door opened upon a wall of concrete instead of his quarters. The only one who ever took tea there was Ferdinand, when he wanted to yell through the wall at Hubert and continue an argument without encountering any pesky booby traps.

The Prime Minister was not in residence now. All of the furniture had been pushed up against the walls, and in its place in the center of the room stood a rectangular glass enclosure as long as two Huberts in either direction. A heat sigil illuminated one side of the mulched cypress floor.

“Step four is…don’t yell,” Bernadetta finished. She glanced back at him and drank in the childish wonder so stark upon his pallid face, the sea glass glitter of his eye. 

Hubert stepped forward and crouched down outside the heated end of the enclosure, where he came face to face with the young Dagdan tegu basking in the warmth. It blinked sideways at him, but was otherwise too sated on its dinner of ground venison and raw offal to pay much mind.

It had taken Bernadetta years to graduate from her greenhouse to the Vestra poison labs, and then to the herpetology research facility hidden within the grounds of the imperial menagerie. Hubert only ever demonstrated the milking of serpents and the proper way to process the poison sacs from deceased specimens, and it remained the single facet of his work that had never bloodied her own dainty gloves. When she asked Edelgard about his reluctance, the Emperor waved it off, saying it was the optics of playing with lizards while they marched to slay dragons. But Hubert never cared much for optics. It seemed something different, something simpler — the fear of having someone turn up their nose at the thing most important to you.

A fear that Hubert had dispelled for her. It was high time to return the favor.

“The substrate isn’t deep enough,” Hubert said. “It needs—”

“She.”

“She needs—” Hubert ran a hand over his face and startled at the feel of his own bare skin, only then realizing why his gloves had to be removed. For handling.

_Please don’t lose any fingers,_ Bernadetta prayed as her husband leaned over the wall of the enclosure, carefully, from one side instead of from above, and stroked a line down the creature’s warm scales. 

“You have to send Petra a very nice thank you card, okay? She brought her all the way here by Petra Post…” 

Apparently, the creatures were not indigenous to Dagda despite their name, and the locals were always happy to be rid of another of their invasive pests. Petra had laughed grandly at the request and promised a properly sour little spirit for Hubert to bond with. Tegus were rarely exported alive due to the peculiarities and difficulties of care, but Hubert was Hubert, and neither of them expected him to struggle.

“And it’s just a temporary habitat!! Bernie knows you know better. I just needed somewhere safe for her to rest until you took over. Oh! And the kitchens know to keep venison on hand, if you want to keep her here? Or you can move her to…wherever you want, I guess! I just. I thought…you’d like her. I know you always wanted one.”

Hubert barely moved, still staring at the creature like a man transfixed by a debilitating spell. “They’re not poisonous,” he said.

It took Bernadetta a moment to follow the sense of his words. “No. I knew that. But…things don’t need a purpose for you to love them, right?” 

“Wise as ever, Lady Vestra.”

She wilted a little at the name. “Anyway. That’s all. Happy birthday, Hubert.” 

And off she scurried, closing the door firmly behind her so that no one would intrude upon Hubert’s special bonding moment with his new pet.

If anyone caught Bernadetta crying as she walked back to her own quarters, they were kind enough not to mention it. But oh…to know she had given him joy on his birthday? Not only love’s faint shroud, but laughter’s buoyant satisfaction? The blissful awe of a dream come true?

No gift could be greater. 

Or at least that was what she told herself.

Because really, what more had Bernadetta expected? She had not plied him with gifts to get something out of him; no equation defined the reward for how much effort she had spent. She wanted him happy. He was, beyond words! Anything else was selfish and transactional and empty.

There was no use crying over goodnight kisses never kissed.

  


—

  


“You got him a _lizard?”_

“Yes, and he loved it, thank you,” Bernadetta sniffed. She kept fluffing her mountain of pillows even when Edelgard crawled onto the bed behind her and reached out to braid her hair for sleep. 

“If he loved it so much, why isn’t he here?”

Whirling with a scowl, Bernadetta sank into her pillows like a fretful violet dragon upon its hoard. “Gosh, I don’t know, El! Maybe if you had knocked his knees under the table a little more—”

The Emperor frowned. “I was helping.”

“You _weren’t._ He’s—sensitive, okay? I’m playing the long game.”

“A long war only results in higher casualties. Higher disruption to—”

“The local stuffed animal economy?”

“Bernadetta. All I’m saying is that you could stand to be a little more…direct.”

She threaded her fingers into her hair, tugging at the roots in frustration. “But he isn’t! Not with me! That’s not how we work. And, and _you’re_ direct and what good did it do all these years!”

“Well I wooed you, didn’t I,” Edelgard grumbled to herself.

“But you didn’t!”

“Excuse me?!”

“I wooed you! I did all the woo! You were too busy planning the war—”

“Yes, the Wooing Bernadetta War. And I’ll wage it again if you throw one of those pillows at me, I swear.” Edelgard burrowed into the mountain herself, moving stuffed animals this way and that until she was comfortable. A full council of friendly faces gazed upon Bernadetta by the time Edelgard spoke again. “Look…somehow or another we succeeded with each other. We simply need to evaluate what worked then, so we can repeat it now.”

“It’s not the same. It’s nearly the opposite! Because the more I knew you, the closer you wanted to get. You called me by my name, and you wanted me to call you _El,_ and Hubert just…pushes me away.” She tipped back her head to stare at the ceiling.

Hubert used to call her Bernadetta. In the war. When all their fancy boundaries and structures had broken down and fallen away like dried bark on a tree. But now she could butt her soft horns against the tree all day, and its thick hide would never falter, never reveal the soft green wood within. Now she was Lady Vestra, locked in her little box as firmly as in a chair. 

“We’re going to figure it out,” Edelgard promised in that effortlessly serious way of hers, the same fire bolstering her political speeches as easily as it won her the last slice of golden apple pie. “I promise you, my dear one. We’ll find a way.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Imperial Year 1177**

On the second Thursday of each moon, Hubert penned a letter to his future father-in-law regarding Lady Bernadetta’s progress in her many studies. The way she waited for Hubert’s return from each mission, so that she could dutifully strip the knives from his person and set about cleaning the bloody detritus in preparation for the morning’s reapplication of poison. How her quiet steps had turned silent and precise, so that even Hubert could not discern when she approached with pastries or a well-strung garrote. That he gave his intrepid bride the corpse of a milky white calf, and now after days of lime baths and scraping the haggard hair from the treated skin, she had begun to produce her first sheaves of vellum, all in a high enough quality for use in a Vestra grimoire.

That the pages were far more likely to be used in Bernadetta’s manuscripts or the Emperor’s manifold plans, Hubert did not bother to mention.

Of all his duties, it was strange how this one-sided correspondence was the hardest to accomplish. The words flowed freely enough, each offering of praise in Bernadetta’s honor as good as a drip of poison in her father’s foulest cocktail. Hubert idly wondered if the letters were even read, and he daydreamed now and again of folding the parchment into the wheezing chasm of Varley’s esophagus rather than wax-sealed envelopes. And it was unquestionably better for him to assume this task rather than allow Bernadetta to ever turn a moment’s thought in the direction of the roaches that spawned her.

Still. There were so many things that Hubert could not write. 

It was not a matter of righteous, riotous plots and tight-lipped discretion. No torture existed that could extract such secrets from Hubert’s unyielding mortal frame; he certainly did not waste time on banal thoughts of jotting such matters down in a child’s diary for the burning.

What Hubert wished to write—to _record,_ rather, was a memory of. Well.

Joy.

There was no other word for it. _Joy._ After everything his Lady had endured, life and love proved indomitable. If all their plans came to naught but their early deaths, Hubert wanted the world to know how they laughed in the face of such grim odds, how the same hand that gripped the bloodied axe could reach out with infinite gentleness, could string garlands of poesies around the neck of a little lavender songbird.

How that songbird would turn, eyes bright in the light, and strike the interloper through the heart before he heard a single note, undeserving wretch that he was. 

Hubert had played interloper for many moons, now. He could not put his finger precisely upon the day it began, when Bernadetta no longer considered herself a trapped poodle left crated in the corner every time Hubert and Edelgard conversed with her in the same room. She had always been good at listening for the subtle shifts of temperament that spelled danger, but with Edelgard’s staunch support, Bernadetta began to listen to diction in the same way, to tease her clever fingers into the knots of logical fallacies and rage-driven oversights in their plans. 

When she first approached him and requested the oft-threatened Vestra training in truth, Hubert failed entirely at suppressing the sneer of cruelty that slithered across his face, the dark tone as he leaned down and inquired if she meant to replace him entirely in Lady Edelgard’s esteem. 

Bernadetta’s knees shook, and her eyes fled to the floor’s less anxious climes, but she answered him clear as day. “No, Bernie could never. But if I knew enough to help you—to, um, keep the rookery operating while you were away? You’d have less to do, so you could do _more._ Right?”

She learned to weave terror so avidly with her quiet, subservient smile. Hubert would never ask her to take a life, not unless Lady Edelgard’s own safety was threatened, but the knowledge that he _could,_ that potential and boundless loyalty festered in her day after day? That she looked to him as a model of service and took to the work like his unassuming echo, vassal and lady-in-waiting operating their grim business in silent harmony, a matched set of cutlery in the Princess’s hands as she carved up her dinner—he had not the words to express such an honor. To marry such a colleague would be no small victory.

And yet their lonely triptych folded in on its hinges once more, a game of cups in play. Blink once, and the Princess and her shadow swallowed up an innocent soul. Blink twice, and the shadow and seamstress joined their hands. Blink and miss the poison, the needle, the knife. Now the shadow stepped aside, disappearing outside doorways like some liminal guardian, a rook bristling his wings to shield what unfolded in their shade.

To put it simply: His Lady had fallen in love.

It began with painting lessons. It was Bernadetta, of course, who convinced Edelgard to engage a tutor after declaring that the arts could not only be enjoyed alongside history, philosophy, and martial tactics, but provide necessary time for contemplation of those weightier topics. Though Hubert doubted such reflection ever took place, it was true that two or three hours of sketches and watercolors each week did wonders for Edelgard’s focus.

For more personal reasons, Hubert had dreaded the return to such lessons. As a child, Lady Edelgard had sought him out as an artistic subject on numerous occasions, always appearing in an exuberant whirlwind to demand he hold a stick at such and such angle so that she could perfectly capture his stance in her scribbles. He had even less desire now to be captured upon the canvas in such a way, all nicked edges and sharp corners, growing into his newfound height and dour brows with alarming disharmony. 

New subjects occupied Edelgard now. The domestic elegance of small, swift fingers mending an ill-fitting dress of sanguine satin. A strip of porcelain skin peeking out between a messy mop of lavender and a high collar. Songbirds fleeing from the opened doors of their gilded cages, only one lark content to remain and freely trill its tune within. Peaceful ripples lapping against the shore of a pond, and a line of stepping stones down its shapely middle, spaced as precisely as vertebrae.

Hubert rarely so much as glanced at her work. It did not involve him — surely that was part of its allure, a breath of fresh air from the choking fate that his presence summoned to mind.

But no, Edelgard not only breathed him out, she breathed in a spirit more vibrant still.

On the day Hubert discovered his next great purpose, his Ladies were painting in the same well-lit parlor. No surprise there, as Bernadetta attended all of Edelgard’s lessons as her secretary, even now that malingering fevers no longer pricked holes through her memory. Nor was there any scandal to be found in Bernadetta’s own canvas, carefully positioned so that none but the artist and an insufferably curious fiance could peer at the work thereupon. 

As Hubert gazed at the image of Edelgard’s scarred and calloused hands cupping water at the shore of a pond, at the stepping-stone path arching through the background, the unearthly waves reaching to embrace her dry feet and tempt her onward to the deeps she feared, a whisper of promise and heady longing, hands stroking along that broken spine—he stumbled smack into the pianoforte. It teetered dangerously on its fragile legs and saved him utterly, for his Ladies thought his untimely blush a matter of embarrassment, rather than—

Hubert would not recount such lurid thoughts.

That Bernadetta had them about her Princess, and that Lady Edelgard shared the same sweet inclination—no. He would not demean their kindred affections by kindling any fellow fondness in his breast. If they tiptoed towards each other in the shadows, all the better for him to chart the way and carve a path for them to tread. 

Yet that was all they did. Tiptoe. Turn their canvases in opposite directions. Whirl around each other too quickly for their hands to join.

On the occasion of her own fifteenth birthday, Lady Edelgard magnanimously presented Bernadetta with a purebred Hresvelgion Whisker to serve as companion during the ever-rarer days when Bernadetta did not emerge from her room. It purred sweetly and accepted pettings for exactly three hours, then disappeared through the crack of a door. Hubert spent the next week crawling on hands and knees through the palace with a bowl of tuna, _meowing_ like one of the hypnotized imbeciles lured into a magician’s spectacle in the town square. 

No, he assured Edelgard, Bernadetta will not blame you for a runaway birthday present, as the entire point of a cat is the mind of its own, otherwise one would acquire a Hevring Guppy. 

No, he assured Bernadetta, Edelgard will not blame you for failing to preserve your birthday present, as the entire point of a cat is keeping it off the leash, otherwise one would acquire an Aegir Hound.

The whiskered bastard had fattened itself on a lifetime of kitchen mice by the time Hubert finally found it, and in the interest of domestic peace, he let the cooks keep it. 

The next imperial courtship endeavor involved a long line of structurally exquisite yet entirely unadorned dresses, which Edelgard acquired for Bernadetta’s embellishment. There was simply not enough space to do full tailoring around the palace, she explained, despite the fact that they lived in a _palace,_ a necessarily massive collection of generally ostentatious but otherwise under-utilized rooms. Still, it was strangely charming to hear her promise Bernie an atelier of her own someday, to which Bernadetta argued a preference for sitting in the sun next to her princess to work on far more mundane stitches.

Hubert received no less than sixty cravats, handkerchiefs, pillowcases, and tea towels that summer. Bernadetta could not play favorites, even when the transcendent golden eagle emblazoned upon Edelgard’s newest dress told the story all too clearly.

The only time his Ladies truly freed him from the burden of witnessing their anxious fumbling was when they slipped away to the training grounds together. Once her strength returned, Edelgard had thrown herself into the study of every martial skill available, all with Bernadetta beside her. Faith, reason, the handling of pegasi — such lessons ended as soon as they started, for Edelgard had little aptitude and lesser interest, yet she forged on with her plan of exposing Bernadetta to as many arts of the battlefield as possible. Someday, their war would dawn. Edelgard wished her lady-in-waiting to march beside her.

Only archery caught Bernadetta’s interest, beyond her usual heart palpitations over seeing the princess sweaty and disheveled during such intense training. Though Edelgard admitted to a certain light-hearted disappointment over their differing choices, Hubert heard a hundred declarations of how perfectly the cards— _no, the arrows!_ —had fallen. _One close range, one distant! A strike force of our own! Lady Bernadetta, raise your bow and shoot. Let us see just how many throat shots you can manage before I cleave this training dummy in two with my axe!_

Hubert’s own opinion held no sway, nor should it. But still Bernadetta confessed to him, quietly, that the most efficient assassination was that from afar, and her keen eyes would best serve their future Emperor by picking off her enemies in advance. 

Then she asked for her own storage kit for poison, for her arrowheads, and.

Hubert did not subscribe to the petty illusions of a chemically-altered brain. Love was an excuse for poor behavior, a balm to one’s pride after a contemptuous lack of control.

Nevertheless. Even he could admit that if a mere vassal cared for such a thing as love, that would have been the moment it struck him senseless.

He did not, so it did not.

The work carried on.

Currently, that work involved purging the Vestra spy rings of any operatives overly loyal to the current Marquis. Mere opportunists, excepting those who had personally distinguished themselves at the expense of the Hresvelgs, were no threat, save that he couldn’t buy them off until the last possible moment, as the Marquis had larger coffers by far. Those loyal to Adrestia rather than any particular politician saw Hubert as a favorable sea change, and he did nothing to dissuade their frustration that such a day was far off. 

As for the rest, Hubert devoted his time to two disparate fields: acquisitions, since any disillusioned servants and harrowed commoners he brought into the trade were unlikely to trust other Vestras due to their haughty overabundance; and dispositions, which required a far more judicious touch. 

Those that the Marquis trusted enough to admit into his inner circle numbered twenty at most, and they could not simply vanish into the night without unwanted suspicion falling upon Hubert’s head. Likewise, all were two, three times Hubert’s meager years, well-seasoned operatives who had occasionally administered Hubert’s own training. He could not purge them with a snap of his fingers. 

His saving grace was the only thing he and his father shared: a near-blinding loathing for the slithering butchers. The most trusted operatives were the ones sent to interface with such distasteful allies, and with a bit of forethought, it was all too easy for Hubert to eliminate them after the meet-ups. The blame naturally fell upon the enemy.

That Hubert could personally collect any reports destined for his father’s hand was a happy bonus.

That such missions ran higher risks, invoked greater brutality than any others, Hubert did not choose to share. With broken ribs and shattered fingers, with his throat raw and bloody where his enemy’s nails dug for purchase, with all of him one rasping ache, he always limped home to report to his Lady.

And if one night he found her room empty, and the door to Bernadetta’s adjoining room left ajar? If he peered in out of weary concern to find them curled in each other’s arms, trading kisses like such evils did not exist outside the walls of their fortress—no, like such evils could never stop them?

Then it was all worth it.

He sagged into an armchair in Edelgard’s quarters and let himself drift until she returned for their debriefing. His Ladies were safe. They were loved. And to rest in the shadows buoyed by such vicarious warmth was all the balm needed for his weary bones.

(He would not be any good at kisses, after all.)

To witness their joy was an honor. To let it slip away unremarked, a crime more callous than any thus far. 

Hubert wished the world to know and tremble, yet he would not share such wonder with the undeserving masses. The sanctity of these secrets sustained him well through his darkest nights, like fireflies drawing his eye away from a blood moon. 

But sometimes, his hands itched to rip even this veil from the eyes of their monsters, to make them see in their final moments that evil had not only lost but failed to stain its victims. That his Ladies danced in the light. That they smiled.

That they were not victims, but the victorious.

_Bernadetta will flourish,_ he did not write. _And someday from the moldering cell in which you rot, from the gallows where you are hanged before all the world’s gloating eyes, from your piss-watered grave, you will know that you have failed._

  


* * *

  


**Imperial Year 1187**

All their wars were ended now, but still Hubert had not learned the art of rest.

It bothered Bernadetta more than she could properly put into words, because, well—she sewed! And she drew and she read and wrote and daydreamed and whiled away her hours through childhood, wartime, and peace, so who was she to complain of someone working, when they worked to grant her such easy days?

Of course, the reason she couldn’t put it to words was that it was patently ridiculous, since all those little trivialities were her own brand of work, and Edelgard had long since demanded she stop being ashamed of it. A constantly moving mind saw things others missed, her artistic abilities had lent themselves marvelously to creating terrain maps and weaving encrypted messages into the cross-hatching on charcoal sketches, all of the hidden compartments in their clothes for emergency warp stones and knives and poisons and lucky talismans had been stitched in by Bernadetta, and, well. Logic said it was ridiculous to feel this way, _Edelgard_ said it was ridiculous to feel this was, and therefore it was true.

Still. No matter how much Bernadetta did around the rookery to ease Hubert’s way, she’d feel like a whiny, ungrateful hypocrite if she asked him to simply…stop. 

If she’d been a better wife, maybe she would’ve found a way. Maybe love would’ve kept him at home, or…children. (She was probably old enough to think about that, but preferred not to at the moment. Hush!) An army of lizards, even. Hubert certainly liked the tegu, since it consumed all his waking hours between missions. Edelgard even caught him sitting inside the massive enclosure he’d built for it, reading his reports with one hand while feeding whole shrimp to his reptile with the other.

Maybe that was why tonight’s mission required Hubert’s personal attention. Smuggling along the borderlands of imperial territory always drew his ire—the sheer audacity of thinking any bumbling human could slip out of sight just by crossing a friendly border, let alone slip into the shadows Hubert _owned!_ —yet he usually left such nonviolent crimes to his network. 

But an international tip about a ship currying stolen wyvern eggs, docking tonight in the Bay of Boramas? Claude might as well have stamped Hubert’s name on the missive and drawn a smiley face to boot.

So off Hubert went, and here they were. Emperor and Lady. Waiting. In the dark. Again.

“I’d almost call it nostalgic,” Edelgard sighed as she passed Bernadetta a mug of warm, richly spiced tea. _If it didn’t piss me off,_ she did not finish, but Bernadetta knew her well enough to hear every unsaid word. 

Edelgard probably heard her unsaid words, too. Which was all of them right now. Bernadetta laid her head against Edelgard’s shoulder and closed her eyes against the flickering fireplace’s dancing flames. 

Sometimes…she’d never say this aloud, of course. It wasn’t something that could be helped, so it wasn’t fair to bring it up. But. Edelgard was always so warm, chest and arm and thigh smoldering with comfort, and during the war, sometimes Bernadetta wanted her to. Not.

Heat was life, a greenhouse flourishing and spilling over into the rainforest's abundance, the pulse of blood under scarred skin still eager to fight—and the splash of it over Bernadetta’s palms as she tried to keep her troops alive, as she dragged civilians out of burning homes and let the stifling dry chasms of Ailell blot out all the hope within her heart. 

Hubert’s skin was cold. It would be so nice to press her feverish forehead to the softness of his chest, her hands to the shallow ridges of his ribs.

Nicer still to lie between them both, a bridge in balance.

The long-awaited creak of the floorboards outside Edelgard’s door never came. Instead, a hideous thump sent both women scrambling to the hallway, for the sound was that of a limp corpse dropped at their feet. A sound they knew too well.

It was Hubert, of course. Blurry-eyed yet breathing just fine for a corpse. He blinked at them in disjointed confusion, hands still shaking with the warp spell he had botched the landing on, and croaked, “My Lady.”

Edelgard dipped easily to loop his arm over her shoulders and haul him up. “Come.”

“I—” His wandering gaze settled on Bernadetta, as if only now noticing her, and shame bled over his cheeks in a shade more potent than she’d ever seen on him. Hubert’s heels dug uselessly into the carpet, a futile war against the Emperor’s irresistible momentum. “I cannot intrude.”

“You’re not,” Edelgard answered gruffly. There were no servants scurrying around at this hour, but who knew what the commotion might bring. She hated being seen in her night clothes, whether it was the current long gown or the chemise with embroidered teddy bears.

As Hubert fumbled for his hazy words, Bernadetta reached out and slipped two fingers against his pulse point. Sluggish. Not worrisomely so. His clothes were soaked with sweat, not blood, and as her hands flitted over the lines of his arms and torso he gave no hisses of pain, no signs of swelling. She took each wrist to ensure the trip-knives were disengaged, then smelled his palms and fingertips for any poison he might have soaked into the gloves. Clear. The mission may have gone to hell, but if he hadn’t used any of his close combat tricks, then it probably only cost him his reserves of magic. All he needed was rest.

_“No,”_ Hubert managed, more obstinate than ever with his wife so near. “Not with Lady Vestra. Not my place.”

Bernadetta had borne an entire mountain of nonsense for this wretch of a man, so devoted, so humble that he would sooner self-efface himself from the continent rather than accept a word of praise. She had borne more kindness than she would ever deserve and borne the miserable gulf of distance that he dug between them day by day, ever since the moment they voiced their wedding vows. She would bear no more.

That he was unlikely to remember any of this in the morning did not hurt. 

She caught him by the chin. “Your place is with me. With us.”

Just as Edelgard had told her a decade ago, when Bernadetta avoided any room already occupied by the princess and vassal’s intimate harmony, like a deer interloping upon hunters’ property.

Then as now, Edelgard had no patience for it. When Hubert would not move his feet, she dragged him into her bedroom and dropped him into a wooden chair—simple, with a slatted back that offered no comfort. She shot Bernadetta a meaningful glance, then crossed her arms over her chest with a withering scowl.

“Hubert. I _cannot_ wait for your report on the mission in Boramas. You will deliver it now.”

He pricked back to attention from his listless slump. “Yes. Your Majesty.”

“Did you recover the eggs? No, drink this first. You sound like a clogged storm drain. It’s unbearable.” A warm cup of tea—honeyed, not spiced—made its way into his hands, and Edelgard glared gilded daggers until he finally began to sip.

While the Emperor occupied Hubert’s unflagging commitment to his work, Bernadetta served. Fresh water and towels to clean Hubert’s face of dust and sweat. His knives, gently removed from boot and sleeve and every hidden holster as she knelt by his feet. His gloves, quickly dunked and scrubbed so that they would be ready for a deeper clean the next day. Her fingers slid along the wiry muscles of his calves, stripping the worn leather away and unclipping the garters that held up his so smelly (so human) socks. 

Edelgard did not know the workings underneath Hubert’s clothes, the hidden belts and pockets. Only a Vestra could undress him, here before her Lady’s eyes, and when the intimacy of such a scene struck her, Bernadetta shrugged it away. There were more important matters.

“And where did you leave the contraband?”

“En route to Enbarr. I will personally arrange its transport back to Almyra once—”

“No. _I_ will arrange its transport as head of state.”

“…Of course.”

Ah. This was why Edelgard had left him in such an uncomfortable chair. The open back allowed Bernadetta to access his murder harness and poison bandolier with ease, and she could slip her hands into the hidden pockets under his armpits to liberate the small trove of sigil stones, including the one that could stop his own heart if he snapped it in two. Even now, in peace, at rest, he had not removed it from his kit.

Once fully disarmed, unbuckled, and unbuttoned, Bernadetta slid the sweat-stained shirt from his pasty limbs and sluiced water over his head and shoulders before he could so much as remember the word shame. She toweled him down and slipped a new shirt on, a soft black cotton she’d fashioned into an over-sized nightshirt for herself after failing to make it pleat the way she wanted. 

Hubert blinked at her dimly, as if he had never seen her before, and Bernadetta ducked her head away. Good thing Edelgard was handling all the talking, because Bernadetta’s tongue felt as big and sodden as a sheep fallen in the river, and her words would tumble with worry if she tried to force them out. 

But her busy hands had never known rest.

It took another half hour and two more cups of tea before Hubert’s words began to slip, his head lulling forward as he continued his report like a guard dog nodding off at its post. Bernadetta snatched up the empty cup before it spilled over his jodphurs.

The women made no sound. They shared only a look, and the plan was settled. Edelgard leaned sideways over the chair, sliding her arms under Hubert’s back and knees, and lifted him as easily as a lamb. It was Bernadetta who arranged him from there, positioning his head so it rested gently against Edelgard’s shoulder instead of flopping at a painful angle. She tugged down his pants as well, because he was _not_ going to sleep in them, even if the fact of holding him in his underclothes had Edelgard’s face flaming imperial red in an instant. 

Bernadetta’s chambers connected to the Emperor’s suite by means of an adjoining door. The next suite down the hall was technically hers as well, since the Vestras always had a room on hand for any overnight vigils, but it had only rarely seen use after the war. Hubert commonly occupied it prior to that, when the threat of assassination had been much higher. 

They carried him to the Vestra suite now. Utilitarian as ever, it boasted little more than a comfortable bed, the overflow of Hubert’s office bookshelves, and a sturdy lock. Bernadetta pulled back the covers, Edelgard laid him down, and Bernadetta tucked him in.

And then they should have left.

It was—creepy, to sit and watch someone sleep, but Bernadetta had been a Vestra longer than she hadn’t, and Edelgard knew their ways, so. It was fine. It felt a little like doing for Hubert what he always did for them. Like whispering in his strange and frightful language, but only enough for a single lullaby.

They sat there for a long time. Did his chest rise and fall with even, peaceful breaths because exhaustion had dragged him so low, or did he truly find some measure of genuine rest there with them, when he could no longer fight it? Couldn’t he simply stop fighting? Not the world—she would never restrain the anger that compelled him to action, but at the end of the day couldn’t it be…this? Together?

“How do I make him understand?” Bernadetta’s voice could not even fill the room, this little corner so near and so very, very far from their own warmth.

Edelgard’s only answer was to reach out and take Bernadetta’s hands into hers, as if willing those busy workers, too, toward rest. They gazed at their Hubert until the candle burned low, like twin cats warming the foot of their human’s bed. 

Two different languages joined by a single thread of longing, now fraying at both ends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Give lychee some love for the wonderful art!!](https://twitter.com/lycheeloving/status/1302009449373216771)


	4. Chapter 4

**Imperial Year 1179**

There were no murders on the morning of Hubert and Bernadetta’s wedding.

Ensuring that fact was more difficult than Edelgard wished to admit. It had involved plotting travel routes, tracking itineraries, sabotaging a carriage, paying off an entire Mercean village to dispose of all repair supplies in a twenty mile radius, and copious bribing of Hubert’s people, all to prevent him, just this once, from murdering a man who damn well deserved it.

Edelgard simply objected to the murder’s timing.

The plan went as follows. On the joyous occasion of the long awaited nuptials, Bernadetta’s father would arrive to sanctify the legal transfer of Bernadetta from the House of Varley to the House of Vestra. The morning of the ceremonies, Hubert would go to finalize matters with his new father-in-law, who would suffer a fatal heart attack within the hour. Thus finalized, the man would never darken Bernadetta’s doorstep ever again, would never see her radiant in her wedding gown nor utter the slightest slander against her immutable perfection. The wedding would be quickly rescheduled due to the tragedy; in fact, it may never take place. And Bernadetta would be free of her obligations, and of Hubert, permanently.

This, Hubert had explained, was why Edelgard need not concern herself with preparing any speech for the ceremony. It would be a waste of her valuable time.

“And?” she had asked, astounded by all he had not said.

Hubert’s brow furrowed. “Surely it is motive enough to butcher swine in place of a wedding feast.”

Tunnel vision. 

Terminal. 

As deadly as the lovesickness he denied, in its own way. To unseat Varley from the Council and incite political upheaval a mere eighteen months before their uprising began? Unthinkable. 

Edelgard nearly took the problem to Bernadetta, so they could laugh over his strange foolishness together, but her love brought worries and declarations of her own to Edelgard’s door.

The plan went as follows. On the joyous occasion of the long awaited nuptials, Bernadetta’s father would arrive for one last show of parental tyranny. She would be brave—prove her fearlessness, her devotion, everything Edelgard saw in her that Bernadetta fretted were only love’s illusions—and meet with him alone. A dutiful daughter would receive him at once, after all. And if she was so truly helpless in his eyes, then he would never see the changes Vestra had brought upon her, never expect the sweet poison in his imperfectly poured tea. Count Varley would die knowing just how well Bernadetta could learn her lessons with the proper motivation. The wedding would be quickly rescheduled due to the tragedy; in fact, it may never take place. And Hubert would be free of his obligations, and of Bernadetta, permanently.

After delivering such a resolution, Bernadetta dissolved into shivering tears, and Edelgard wrapped her in blankets before carrying the whole wilted bundle to bed. 

Patently ridiculous, all of it. They had spent years refining their plans, combing through them for wretched displays of childish emotion and selfishness rather than the utilitarian (yet not sacrificial) rationality their nation required of them, only for a pair of faux lovebirds to overturn it all in their panicked flight from an imaginary cage. So brutally, despairingly in love with each other that the only way to prove it was to cut the other free.

And now Edelgard still had no speech for her best friend’s wedding, her _lover’s_ wedding, because she’d spent the last two weeks saving Count Varley’s miserable life and comforting Bernadetta as the dreaded day approached and picking apart Hubert’s choice of attire, and now, finally, at the end of her rope, milling about near the pews as all the preeminently noble guests schmoozed and judged and earned their places on her hit list, even now Edelgard could not work on it.

Because Ferdinand von Aegir would simply. Not. Shut up.

“I know how difficult this must be for you,” Ferdinand offered in a well-oiled tone of friendliness, not nearly as quiet as he pretended to be. He had waved to her through the crowd the moment the Aegirs arrived, parted the swarm of marriageable young ladies attempting to speak with him, and affixed himself permanently to her side, a burr tangled in the sleek perfection of her hair. 

“Difficult. Yes.”

“To have someone aside you all your life, only for them to swear themselves to another… Dreadful.” 

She grunted vaguely.

“But please, grant yourself the solace of reason. Allow it to scatter all these shadows of concern that darken your heart on this fine day! There is nothing to fear from Hubert. You see, the devotion a vassal swears to his lord is not at all similar to the devotion between husband and wife. The seeds may look the same in the palm of the hand, but once planted only a fool could mistake them.”

“True, the righteous man honors both fields in turn. The roses brought forth by his wife’s attentive care and unwavering respect are treasures to him. He would trade them for no other flower in all the world. And yet! The crops that sprout from his unbreakable loyalty, watered to thriving by love of lord and country, it is these he values above all heartfelt frippery. If the future drags us all to drought, Hubert will still prepare your bounteous table before all others. And any wife of his will certainly do the same! No marriage could stand between the service he has already sworn to you and embodied through—”

“Ferdinand?”

“Yes?”

“The ceremony is starting.”

“Ah. Ah!” He jolted, hands leaping to the hem of his vest and tugging it back down into place. It had ridden up during his many evocative full-body gestures. 

Edelgard held her breath as his eyes skimmed the room, searching for his parents and the seat surely saved for him—but no such luck. Ferdinand simply waved in acknowledgment to Duchess Aegir, then offered his arm to Edelgard. His chest puffed up, and crooked went the vest once more. “Might I keep you company?”

The front row of any Vestra wedding was reserved for the imperial family. 

Ferdinand had no right to sit there, usurper’s son that he was.

But Edelgard would be sitting alone, otherwise, and perhaps she could make use of him. If Ferdinand delivered that operatic Monologue on Marriage and Devotion again for the reception, everyone would fall asleep before it was time for Edelgard’s nonexistent toast. 

“Very well.”

They sat a respectable distance apart. Ferdinand knotted his hands together as though his own child were to walk the aisle, his leg jittering against the bench. His gaze darted around like a bee determined to sample every flower in the meadow.

Edelgard had eyes only for Hubert. He stood alone at the altar stone, clad in the well-tailored dress uniform of the senior sorcery corps. Even his gold buttons were dim, unpolished lest they catch the light, and she had half a mind to accuse him of dressing for a wake rather than a wedding. Two meager spots of color broke the barrage of black: a sprig of lilac in his buttonhole and the ghoulish bruising of his hands, clasped primly behind his back to spare everyone the sight. 

To swear an oath to another, there could be no barriers. Hubert would reach for Bernadetta’s hands without the artifice of white cotton. The same way he had once reached for Edelgard’s.

Except she could not _remember._ True, Edelgard had been only four years old, and time may have stolen the memory rather than the more recent claws scouring through her flesh, but—she wished. Did he remove his gloves, as proper at six as he would be all his life? Did she smile at him, bewildered but unafraid, because his still-pink fingers were so soft and warm in hers? 

Did he know how to smile, back then?

Hubert never took his confirmation vows to the Church. The ceremony was distinctly unpopular in Enbarr, though most noble children performed it to retain their productive veneer of piety. That Hubert demurred would have little impact on his future. It only meant that this, now, was the first and last vow he would ever swear in the eyes of the law. In Edelgard’s eyes. 

As the music started, she picked through every detail of his stark silhouette and the solemn bow of his chapped frown. Hubert did not turn to watch his bride make her way down the aisle, unchaperoned. The tendons of his wrist flared sharply as he clenched the hands behind his back. Edelgard leaned forward. Was he fearful of setting off Bernadetta’s terrors with too stiff a smile, or…well, no matter. Edelgard did not turn to burden Bernadetta with yet another pair of eyes either. What mattered was the moment she joined Hubert and stepped into his line of vision, when her theory would be confirmed once and for all.

She nearly missed it. The moment that lavender blossom floated into her vision, the rest of the world—even Ferdinand and his twitchy leg—all faded away. 

The bride, _her bride,_ stepped to the altar. She lifted a small, calloused hand into the air, and like a spell, all the breath in Edelgard’s lungs collapsed. 

Bernadetta was lovely.

Always. Immutably. Inescapably. Edelgard knew this, and still could not transmit this knowledge—no poet, she, and hardly an artist either, for her brush shook every time she tried to bring Bernadetta’s delicate features to life. To see her like this, veiled in silk so delicate it could be woven of fairy’s wing and starlight, her happy mop of hair left joyously untamed where it curled beneath her braided crown, all of her radiant beneath the cloud of her white veil and the pinpricks of silver stars traced through it. 

And there, on Bernadetta’s pale wrist, a bow tied in dark violet ribbon. Twin to the one now bound within the long plait of Edelgard’s hair.

From five paces away, Edelgard’s eyes followed that ribbon with the vicious certainty of an eagle tracking an infant hare. Only as it slid towards another predator’s claws did she shiver back to herself, tears leaping to the corner of her eyes, for—there. The shine in Hubert’s dark gaze, the tilt of brow and parting of lips as he gazed down at Bernadetta and so softly took her hand.

Yes. Edelgard was certain of it. 

Hubert had fallen in love.

Thank goodness for Ferdinand’s aggravating presence; it would do no good for the princess to be seen weeping. 

But this, _this_ was her one good thing, and nothing would take it from her. Edelgard would not even speak it and tempt the world’s scorn. It was hers alone. 

Bernadetta loved Edelgard. That she should be married to another changed nothing. 

Hubert, in his particular way, loved Edelgard. That he should be married to another changed nothing.

And now they stood there, quietly declaring their secret promises to each other, of friendship for fear of anything else, tying themselves together as firmly as they had to her. Hubert’s hand, the one not joined with Bernadetta’s, reached for the edge of his dark capelet and draped it across Bernadetta’s shoulder; Bernadetta’s free hand took up her veil, and on tiptoe she positioned it over Hubert’s opposite arm.

Edelgard’s ravens, now husband and wife.

Hers. 

Nothing would ever take them away. She would see to it. She would remake the world until all the chains were broken, all the bars bent, and nothing remained to keep them from spreading their wings against the open sky.

If all her dreams burned on death’s lonely pyre, even then, they would have each other.

And she would be able to rest.

  


* * *

  


**Imperial Year 1187**

_There will be no afternoon tea today. Please arrive at your office for a private portrait sitting at 2 o’clock. Wear your dress uniform. Snacks will be provided. — E & B_

At precisely five minutes before two, Bernadetta shivered with the awareness of her husband standing out in the hallway. He would not raise his hand to knock until only one minute remained, which gave them four whole minutes to hurriedly move the canvas and easel into a corner where he could not peek at their portrait. 

Edelgard greeted him at the door, imperious as ever, as though she had not that very morning wept in despair over her apparent inability to paint lizards. (It was fine. Bernadetta handled it. She loved crafting creatures best of all.) 

“Hubert,” she said, and that was all she said, and maybe it was only jittery nerves but Bernadetta nearly broke into laughter. It was only—Edelgard could fit so _much_ into just someone’s name, in a way no one else had mastered, and today there was more packed into it than ever. 

_Hubert, you wonderful frustration. Hubert, you are killing us. Hubert, almost lover. Hubert, sit down and let us paint you. Hubert, my partner, my wings—I will pluck you like a chicken if you fly from us today._

“I do not recall offering my office to the imperial painter’s guild.”

The Emperor leveled an easy smile at him. “Consider it an act of eminent domain.”

Hubert made a face like a fish hauled up onto the pier, brutally hurled from one environment to the next with the flick of a fisherman’s wrist. Eminent domain was how he and Ferdinand had been terrorizing the rural gentry to get lands for the public schools, and after months of entertaining every petty argument imaginable from even pettier nobles, Hubert had certainly not expected Edelgard to use it on _him._

“Hi, Hubert,” peeped Bernadetta, just to make sure he knew she was there.

A careful twitch of a smile returned his face to almost normal, but smiling, which wasn’t normal at all, really. “Lady Vestra. How troubling that you now share Her Majesty’s poor taste in artistic subjects.”

“Strange criticism,” Edelgard said as she locked the door. “Considering Bernadetta spent the morning capturing your demonic beast on paper.”

Hubert’s dour aura brightened immediately. “She’s here?”

“Under the desk.”

Faster than a featherstitch, Hubert was on his knees behind the credenza, gently rumbling a greeting to his dear Megalania. Although the entire office had long since been restructured to facilitate the tegu’s free roaming, they had needed to keep her in place for the painting process, as well as distract her from unwise investigation of the paints themselves. A few frozen chunks of mango shoved into a rubber toy, and she proved a much happier subject than their newest arrival.

While Edelgard arranged a chair in front of the desk, Bernadetta replaced the easel to its spot in the room’s center. The project was almost done. They’d already sketched in Hubert’s shapes and clothes and gotten some rough colors down, and now it was time for the finishing touches. All their war plans boiled down to this. Either Hubert would understand their intent and meet them halfway, or…this was it, forever. 

The Emperor, Her Shadow, and the Bad Wife who dared too far in love. 

Bernadetta cleared her throat. “Please leave Miss Meg alone and come sit down for us. If you would. Please.”

With a mighty sigh and much grumbling, Hubert assented to their demands. He allowed Edelgard to pose him just so, cool as a breeze off the bay except for where Bernadetta could see his throat bob with awkward nerves. Fondness trickled into her heart, and when Hubert settled, the gentleness of his gaze—well. Edelgard would just have to paint the eyes. 

Bernadetta took a deep, steeling breath. 

And another.

And another. 

The weight of her husband’s attention settled on her shoulders like a winter cloak, and she did what she always did: stared at his feet. There was little detail to capture in his boots, save for the shapely line of his calves and the gentle shine of the light. They’d arranged the painting with an open window as the light source, and the midday sun modeled it perfectly for her now. 

She moved on to the folds and falls of his jodhpurs next, brush tracing every angle like very romantic metaphors she preferred not to think about at the moment. It was her job to finish up the…the logic. Edelgard was excellent at expressing motion in her work, including illumination and shadow, but the finer details of physics and the way different materials reacted to different stimuli was lost upon her. Just like it was Bernadetta’s duty to remove Hubert’s armor, here it was all on her to assemble the pieces into lifelike order. Then Edelgard would make it breathe.

“I didn’t bring any shrimp,” hissed Hubert, and Bernadetta startled back to herself. 

Megalania had emerged from beneath the desk, victorious after her mango, and was now attempting to scale Hubert’s leg in a slippery war of attrition. Her little claws couldn’t keep any traction on his well-polished boots. When they clipped the edge of his pants and stuck, she dangled there like a wyvern caught in a tripwire, hissing miserably. 

Throughout, Hubert had never moved an inch, so stone-faced that the sound could have come from the void itself. 

_“Oh,_ come here Miss Meg, we can’t bother papa right now.” Bernadetta swept over to scoop up the tegu like a baby, and she squirmed riotously in Bernadetta’s arms until finding the most comfortable position with her head against one shoulder. A slip of tongue peeked out to investigate the new vantage. “El? I’m done for now. Can you…?”

Edelgard, who had been basking quietly in the sun, now strode forth with tremendous purpose. Which was the way she always walked anywhere, of course.

She selected one of the finer brushes and brought it to the paints that Bernadetta had mixed earlier. “Hubert. Eyes on me.”

“Surely the novelty of my ghastly visage has worn off by now.” 

The words were too futile to be a proper protest, but Edelgard smirked at them all the same. “I have yet to capture you.”

Her brush moved with the brutality of an axe stroke, carving pale gashes into the stiff and formal line of Hubert’s shoulders. She switched to another with finer bristles to add the texture to his hair, the lawless daring of every flyaway strand that had fallen away from its precisely placed fellows. 

“How troublesome. You are by nature a perfectionist, Your Majesty. You will find never find satisfaction on such a quest, with such a prize as I.”

Edelgard’s brow furrowed as she focused upon the precise angle of Hubert’s nose. She did not care to notice that Bernadetta had dried up like rose petals, instead only quirking a tense smile at Hubert’s allusions. “We shall see.”

They traded another two hours of imperial gazes, intense enough to make Bernadetta squirm even as a bystander, though Hubert bore it unflappably as ever. All throughout, Bernadetta wandered about the room with Megalania, rocking her in her arms, crawling around with her on the floor, trading her for treats when she snatched up one of Edelgard’s slippers and proved reluctant to release such a rare prize. This was what she was best at: creatures even more confused than she was. 

She did not glance at the painting when she passed. She did not look at Edelgard or at Hubert. Her heart had already skipped so many beats that probably Bernadetta was already dead and this was a very strange hell, waiting eternally to finish a present that would make Hubert break her heart beneath one shiny boot. He’d probably frown when he did it. Angry at her for not knowing better, for bringing rejection down upon herself like this. For not living up to his ever so meager expectations of her. 

Bernadetta sat on the floor by the window, where it was so warm even Megalania wanted no friendly petting. She thought of Hubert’s chilly skin. She thought of his hand in hers. She wasn’t a perfectionist, couldn’t be, would only hurt herself more deeply for the attempt, but she didn’t need perfect from anyone else either.

She just. Needed.

“Bernadetta? I need your eye.”

And it was so nice to be needed, too.

Bernadetta scurried over to the easel, peeked close, and then pulled Edelgard back so they could gaze at the portrait from a more typical distance. 

“Can you finish the final details?” Edelgard handed her the brush.

Shaking her head, Bernadetta plopped it right into the small bucket with the other dirty tools. “It doesn’t need any. It’s as perfect as it’s ever going to get.”

The Emperor stared at her for a long moment, eyes soft and warm for all their icy sheen. 

“Might your lowly subject witness this new masterpiece?” Hubert drawled. He clearly meant to sound bored; he hit somewhere closer to embittered. Dragged into the limelight against his will once more…

The rug of clarity slipped out from underneath Bernadetta’s feet, and blood bloomed from her lip before she even realized she had bitten it. He would hate it. He would hate them. She had to try anyway. She couldn’t run but she couldn’t stay there either, and as Edelgard turned the easel around, Bernadetta froze up entirely.

It was a very simple painting. 

Almost every Minister that ever served Adrestia had one just like it. An imposing man would be sitting in a chair, or standing near his greatest accomplishment, and in the background his wife blended into the furniture, his staunchest supporter. Sometimes a family pet or their own young children would crowd around the edges, depending on how paternal an impression was desired. And that was all. Simple.

Like the man himself, Hubert’s portrait was decidedly atypical. He sat formally in a chair at the center of the arrangement, and on each of his shoulders rested a pale hand clenched protectively in the dark fabric. Flanking him on either side were Edelgard and Bernadetta, framed as twin wives, and far from disappearing into the background, they shone. They had painted each other’s likeness, a whole decade of longing in every stroke, and from the radiant gleam of Edelgard’s proud smile to the cagey glee in Bernadetta’s, their love bled through mere paint and paper to imbue even the viewer with warmth. At Hubert’s feet, Megalania reached a curious claw to pull at the curtain of his cape, and wherever the desk or bookshelves could be spotted behind the attention-grabbing figures, they were littered with the tools of the Vestra trade. On the narrow sliver of windowsill, Thornbert von Prickle’s long spiny tendrils reached toward the light.

And Hubert, who always had a kind comment for his Ladies’ artistic endeavors, said nothing. 

“Well?”

Even Edelgard’s teasing demand sent Bernadetta shaking with terror. No. No, no, this was a stupid plan, Bernie was a useless stupid ingrate the moment she let herself fall for—Hubert looked _stricken,_ as if Edelgard had raised a knife to her own throat, and Bernie, Bernie couldn’t—

Edelgard’s hand settled on the small of her back, a heavy warmth. She angled herself between Bernadetta and their Hubert, and did what she always did. Took charge.

“This is how we see you,” Edelgard announced with a gesture to the painting. The set of her deceptively fine jaw dared him to argue. “You call us _Your Ladies,_ and it is true. We are yours. However you wish to define that, we will leave to your consideration. But it has proved intolerable for us to proceed without letting you know.”

_Intolerable._ That was how Hubert looked at them now, shaken from his foundations like a wasp nest cleaved from a tree, all his intricate plans sundered in an instant. By love. By this wretched, wonderful ache in her chest.

She drifted back to the window, stepping carefully over Megalania’s basking bulk, so that she could stare out at the empty sky. Hubert and Edelgard’s voices faded to a familiar background hum.

“I…do not understand.”

“What is there to understand? It is a matter of love. You have loved me all my life, Hubert.”

“Your Majesty—”

“Call it devotion, if you must.”

“If you mean to imply I have been— _stewing_ here in your gracious shadow, like a gutted marmot in a boiling pot? Choking on unrequited madness?” His voice shook. Anger. 

Anger and fear. Bernadetta wrapped her arms around herself. 

“I have implied no such thing. You have never made the slightest demand upon me. If anything, you are happiest in your selflessness.” A pause, as she silenced his incoming argument. “I understand the topic is…complex. Bernadetta and I have had misunderstandings of our own, which I prefer not to repeat. The truth of the matter is that we _feel_ loved by you, Hubert. That is the name we are putting to it. And our frustration in not being able to return that feeling grows by the day. If restraint is a leash you have put around your own neck, we would have it removed. But if love is truly an innate abhorrence to you, then that will be the end of it.”

Hubert whispered something then, rasping and wounded, and a moment later the floorboards creaked as he approached Bernadetta carefully from behind.

Ridiculous. Not a board in this whole office would ever creak. She burst into tears and wished she could soar through the window on wings in truth. 

“Bernadetta…”

“I am trying to woo you,” she managed. Six whole words before she dissolved into shuddering sobs. 

He’d called her by name. But only to appease her. 

She wept even harder, bracing herself against the windowsill until Hubert ever so softly lay a hand on her shoulder and tugged her away.

“I cannot begin to comprehend why you would want to,” he explained. “Nor what you are trying to accomplish. It…may be that our definitions for. Love. Are at odds. That is not to say incompatible. If I must use your definition, then I suppose the problem becomes…how could I possibly love you more than I already do?”

Bernadetta wilted. “As your wife.”

_“Flames,_ how have we botched all our ciphers for this?” His fingers dug into her shoulders. Like the portrait. The portrait he hated. “I cannot offer you empty words. But that does not mean the— _feeling_ —is entirely foreign to me. Your friendship has always been—”

She burst into tears again. 

Hubert liked her as a friend. It was so much more than he’d ever expected in a wife! And that was wonderful! Why wasn’t she thankful for it!! Why couldn’t she—

A crooked beak bumped awkwardly against her cheek, her whole body dwarfed by the shadow that curled over her, talons sinking softly into her shoulders, and. His lips. Rough and bitten raw, just like hers. His eyes open, observing fearfully, just like hers. She sank into him with a sigh. 

“So there _was_ a leash after all,” Edelgard commented wryly. 

Hubert pulled back, one moment a frightful specter, and the next riding the wave of his adrenaline as it crashed into the Emperor herself, craning down to kiss her with a hummingbird’s frantic energy. 

And dipping away. Every line of him rigid and wild in panic. _“Your Majesty—”_

Edelgard chased his broken words all the way back down his throat, hauling him down with force enough that Bernadetta squeaked. 

It was not any kind of kiss to be shared at an altar. Edelgard devoured him with the desperation of a battlefield, a fury unseen these last few years of peace when the world no longer teetered on knife’s edge. She kissed with absolute disregard for the height difference—or a long-held desire to drive him to his knees. 

_I only love one way,_ Edelgard had told her. And Edelgard never lied, not to her.

But Edelgard had never kissed her this way either, and all at once Bernadetta ached for the possibility, to settle like a falcon on her lady’s arm instead of a fleeting sparrow. It burned in her, rattled the pot lid as her insides boiled, and she curled her fingers into her skirt as she watched them break apart and crash together once more. All this time she had thought only of her own longing, for Hubert, for all of them together, but _this,_ seeing the halves of her heart meet? Nothing could compare. 

And then Edelgard was kissing _her,_ laughing and crying with delight, whispering about what a brilliant painter she was, and Edelgard’s kisses tasted so different from before, a frisson of magic dancing between their lips.

“Are you happy?” Edelgard asked at last, stroking her thumbs over Bernadetta’s wet cheeks. 

“I’m with you. I’m _perfect.”_

Hubert cleared his throat awkwardly. Still, an improvement. He hadn’t disappeared the first moment they were distracted! “Your Majesty—”

She whirled in a blossom of red. “El. Or Edie. Please, Hubert. I have waited my whole life for—”

Blanching, he pressed a tremulous hand to his face. “Have mercy.”

“It’s hard for him, El.” Bernadetta tugged gently on her sleeve, encouraging her to ease up. “But! He’ll work on it. Right, Hubert?”

“Of course, Lady Vestra.”

Bernadetta flinched back a step. She caught herself on the edge of that sudden riptide of despair. It was hard for him. They’d just established that. It was fine.

But Hubert took a step towards her, then another, still running on the fumes of desperation and unwilling to keep their traditional distance. He took her hand, all on his own. 

Wordlessly, he waited. As if after all the lessons he’d ever imparted to her, it was now her turn to teach. 

She took a breath. “It’s nothing. I just. Miss when you used to say my name. Not my title. But it’s fine! Really. Like I said, it’s hard for you, and…yeah. That’s all.”

“I will gladly use your name if it pleases, Bernadetta.”

Actually, maybe not, because she couldn’t suppress the shiver his tender tone sent through her bones, and it would be very inconvenient if this heat bloomed in her belly every time he said her name.

“However,” Hubert continued. “I must clarify that it is not a title, to me. It is selfishness. You are the only good thing my family has ever had. If I imbue the words with any emotion, it is awe. Just as I cannot help but approach Her Majesty with reverence. That there is anyone in this rotten wasteland of a society that I can see soaring fearlessly above it… I consider it a gift.”

All these years he’d been saying _Lady Vestra,_ when he really meant _Mine._

“O-oh. That’s, that’s okay then. If you want to call me that. But Hubert, I, um. I want something, too.”

“Anything.”

“I want you to break your vows.”

Bernadetta had never told Edelgard what their marriage vows entailed. They were not meant to be spoken beyond the hearing of husband and wife. It was the only secret Bernadetta and Hubert shared, except it wasn’t a secret at all, because it was all variations on the same thing he’d told her ever since the day they first met.

_I have no intention of being any sort of husband to you._

She wanted the opposite of that. The tears spilled over again, and she let them without shame. The words spilled too.

“I want to be your wife. Not as a title. As _yours._ I want you to touch me and hold me and, and rely on me to stand by your side even if I’m scared. Your side, not your shadow. I want your happiness to matter. I want you. I _want._ And maybe I don’t really know what that means, if there’s—love and love love and. So many different kinds. But I love you like poison, _all_ the kinds, and they’re gnawing through Bernie’s gut because she—I—” She sucked in a breath so deep she had to throw back her shoulders to make room. “You’ve always been so, so careful to make sure Bernie’s absolutely free to live whatever life she wants. But the life I want is that one in the painting. So…so if you want it too, even a little, then please. Let us love you?”

“I fear there is no stopping you.” There was a crack in his voice, tremendously small, the kind that would grow to split a mountain in two. He pressed a kiss to her hair.

Unsatisfied, Edelgard seized his sleeve. “No. You will not _concede_ to this. I require no less than your utter volition to—”

He dipped to kiss her once more, softly this time. When he straightened his back, he looked helplessly between them, frowning. The words would not come.

Tired of all the dramatics that were stealing her attention, Megalania plodded over and clawed at her papa’s long legs for Ups. Hubert bent to lift her from the floor, then clutched her in much the same way Bernadetta held onto her stuffed animals. He wandered the room in a daze, rocking his lizard.

Kiss-drunk and full of hope’s sweet champagne, Bernadetta whispered, “We opened all his boxes. I think we broke him.”

The Emperor collapsed into her arms, heavy and light and spinning her round. Her forehead pressed to Bernadetta’s. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

Edelgard’s eyes gleamed, cut amethysts at home amongst wildflowers. “For being exactly who you are.”

It sounded like her voice shook, just a little. Maybe she’d had jitters hidden under everything else. That this would ruin things. That her hard-won life would change. Bernadetta could never have taken Hubert away from her, not with marriage or babies or any other meaningless pursuit, but this? Making Hubert look at her, heart in hand, in truth? It could have ruined _everything._

Bernadetta joined her hands at the small of Edelgard’s back. Across the room, she caught Hubert eying her, cagey yet thoughtful. He hazarded a smile.

She remembered what his lips felt like on hers, and smiled right back.

There would be so many changes. It took them five years to remake the world, and only five hours to remake their own. And now, to make all the pieces fit? To make them happy and, maybe, whole?

Bernadetta would have it done in five featherstitches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Give lychee some love for the wonderful art!!](https://twitter.com/lycheeloving/status/1302009449373216771)
> 
> Worldbuilding that didn't make it in, for your enjoyment:  
> \- Megalania is the name of an ancient giant monitor lizard and is commonly mistranslated as "ancient giant butcher." Linhardt now calls them Big Butcher (Miss Meg) and Little Butcher (Hubert) whenever he sees them together.  
> \- The war still happened, but went Differently. Hubert, Sylvain, and Claude have an international penpal circle going where they devise increasingly bloody battle plans for the others to counter. Yes, it's Ye Olde Civilization IV. To date, Hubert and Claude have attempted 17 winter land wars in Faerghus, all doomed to failure. It's a matter of pride. They WILL figure it out.  
> \- Ferdinand is very Sad and the urge to write a quartet epilogue is Strong...
> 
> [@aureafila](https://twitter.com/aureafila)


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